TEAM TANZANIA

 Introduction

Our team of UCSF and MUHAS students is currently congregating at the MUHAS campus in Dar es Salaam Tanzania to work with the Academic Learning Project.

UCSF and MUHAS have an established collaborative partnership aimed at enriching and improving medical research and training on both campuses. The Academic Learning Project (ALP), which we will be helping with while in Dar is a research initiative founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The long term goal of the ALP is to improve the health of the Tanzanian people by increasing the numbers of health care professionals in the country. There is currently a critical shortage of trained health care providers in Tanzania, with only 3 physicians per 100,000 people and 13 nurses for 100,000- well below the WHO recommendations. The ALP is intended to be a three year project that will produces revised undergraduate and graduate curriculums that will allow practitioners to meet the health needs of Tanzanians. It is hoped that the ALP will serve as a model of a successful and mutually beneficial partnership between African and American Universities.

We will be working on the Tracer Study for which we will be interviewing recent MUHAS graduates, their employers, co-workers and patients in order to identify competencies and deficiencies in their training from MUHAS. This needs assessment will serve as the basis for future curriculum revisions and development.

While working on the Tracer Study we will be partnering with current MUHAS students, and will be paired according to discipline (for example a UCSF dentistry with a MUHAS dentistry student etc). Our team consists of students from all faculties- medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing and public health.

Kwaherini, 

Molly, Evan, Lin, & Joy